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> easy to confuse physical presence with productivity Early in my career I worked for the US division of a giant Japanese company. On the occasions that execu
by michaelteter 3y ago
> easy to confuse physical presence with productivity
Early in my career I worked for the US division of a giant Japanese company. On the occasions that executives from Japan would come visit, we were expected to periodically stop working (programming) and carry papers to and from other cubicles and manager offices.
This apparently gave the impression that we were working very hard, when of course it was really making us less productive.
- eddtries 3y agoJapan is improving here thankfully! I’ve heard of workplaces that have drones fly around buzzing at 6pm to try kick people out
- ben_jones 3y agoWait wouldn’t a drone hitting a person or a ceiling fixture and then crashing into a person be really dangerous? Like they’re fixing workplace culture by careening rotary aircraft around the room?
- jcpst 3y agoYeah, that’s why it’s so important to get out of the office by 6. They don’t want anyone to get hurt.
- tessierashpool 3y agodoes that really count as improving? another way to make sure nobody gets hurt by the robots flying randomly around the space is to not set robots flying randomly around the space
- BagelGuy 3y agoIf they aren't in physical danger why would they leave the office before 6pm?
- jcpst 3y agoExactly- it’s risky business.
- numpad0 3y agoHas to be an extreme one-off case, but not completely implausible. Self reported overtime pay and cramped condominiums incentivize especially white-collar workers to slack and stay, and strong economy traditionally meant weaker incentives for management to control it(before factoring in that middle managers themselves might have slow cooking divorce too). Nowadays many organizations have overtime pay caps, monitoring, and enforcement/encouragements - e.g. MDM on laptops, SSO login histories, or by turning off lights and HVAC. It is improving at a rate and in that kind of spirit, perhaps just not using glass breaking drones.
- pfannkuchen 3y agoMaybe management knew you were faking and it’s the thought that counts?
- johnnyanmac 3y agoMaybe, but that's also just how Japanese culture was for decades. Presentation matters 10x more there than in America (and presentation still matters quite a bit in the US).
- thequadehunter 3y agoThis is just Japanese culture. A lot of time, people know it's less efficient, but the Japanese idea of efficiency in itself is different than in the US. In Japan, it's not about doing things in the most efficient way. It's about being on the same page as everyone else. The mindset is that even if this way is less efficient, if everyone does it the exact same way every time, you can guarantee quality and consistency. Hard work is also held in high regard even if it's dumb work, because you're signaling to everyone that you're a team player-- as opposed to a rockstar who wants all the credit and recognition. The upsides to this are what Japan is famous for-- quality and consistency. It's why the train is always on time and the convenience store is always around the corner. The downside is that you're often punished for innovating or thinking on your feet. I personally think this is why Japan is famous for quality products rather than innovative ones.
- david422 3y agoI've learned that appearances can be just as important as actually being productive. ie It's important that the big bosses know who you are and think you are productive, and sometimes that means being less productive in order to show that you are productive.
- mdgrech23 3y agoFeel this speaks how to the social classes omnipresent in our world. We want to pretend we live in a classless society but we really don't. If you have to work for a living you're working class. Too many people these days have become corporate sympathizers trying to justify this absurd bonuses to CEOs.
- enneff 3y agoWho in 2023 is under the illusion that we live in a classless society??
- aksss 3y agoWho in the 21st century still thinks classless societies are even possible? I can't think of a single attempt in reality that succeeded, and it's been tried across cultures and via different methods. It's always a good thing to strive towards (like achieving 100% or 0), but never possible. And class mobility (in both directions) is a great attribute to have - resists classes turning into castes. "There will always be something to envy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_GzXcTkzNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_GzXcTkzNU
- Gormo 3y agoPeople differ from each other in countless particular attributes, but it's entirely a subjective and value-laden activity to select a small subset of those attributes and define a "class" against them.
- zo1 3y agoIt doesn't have to be quantifiable and easily-defined for it to be true in some abstract sense. I'd compare it to multi-dimensional clustering analysis.
- jefurii 3y agoI worked at a Japanese restaurant in college and had to learn how to walk-run to give the impression of busy-ness in order to keep the manager happy. Later when I worked in Japan the OLs (office ladies) always did it too.
- ryandrake 3y agoI've joked in the past (in WFH vs RTO threads) that in order to appease the people who want to see a busy in-person office: companies should just hire actors to run around the office carrying clipboards, sketching on whiteboards, and looking busy, because the visual, performative art of work is all that's important at a lot of places. I wasn't 100% serious about it, but here we are.
- Aurornis 3y agoWeirdly, I've been asked to do the virtual version of this with a remote job. The company's business analysts started tracking everything in dashboards, including our Slack messages. Apparently they would pull up charts of things like messages sent by team or by person, and charts showing when people sent Slack messages. They tried to claim it was just for fun, but then someone slipped up in a meeting and said that they didn't think a team was working much because their Slack activity was low. After that, managers asked us to move more conversations into Slack channels, send morning and evening updates, break up long messages into smaller messages, and other things to get our numbers up. You could tell the managers hated it as much as everyone else, but I guess they were doing us a favor by telling us how to play the game.
- the_sleaze9 3y agogood managers in a bad ecosystem. Sounds like you were lucky to have them. Y'all should've written some automation to send random buzzword paragraphs and system diagrams at a regular, random cadence.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoThey should have broken the dashboards by writing automation to increase the "baseline" to ludicrous levels. A towering spire to the moon, with all other conversations merely pixel-tall bars on the graph.
- ngcc_hk 3y agoOr no of programmer … the founder of this site actually have to hire some more body so yahoo can buy his two person lisp based software.